Fiona MacDougall

UX extraordinaire... In the making!

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The beginning of last week was spent preparing for our client presentations. We had several practice runs, got feedback from our tutors and colleagues and made quite a few changes to the scripts, slides and demo to until we were feeling confident. Presentation day was finally upon us on Wednesday and I have to admit, I was feeling quite nervous. The other teams presented first and did an amazing job!! They were all truly fantastic and I really enjoyed seeing everyone's hard work pay off. We had a very diverse range of projects and clients (from street style, to renting homes, to recruitment for builders) so it was interesting to see everyone's final designs. Our own presentation went well and Vincent did a cracking job of running through the prototype as our main persona, Gregory. I was so proud of our team! :) After the presentation we had a half hour meeting with our client to run through things in more detail. They loved our design and were impressed with all the research and testing we'd done. They were so excited to try out the prototype for themselves and had lots of questions for us. I'm so pleased they liked our work! All the teams breathed a huge sigh of relief and congratulated each other over a couple of drinks later that evening. Now we just need to complete the specification document which we will hand over to our client later next week so they can start work on developing the front end of their app. What a week!

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I think we’re pretty much there now with our high-fidelity mockup! I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out. We still need to test it in order to gain feedback for future iterations but I fell like we’ve done a pretty good job so far :D

Nik has been working hard on the presentation and it’s looking great. We only have 15 - 20 minutes to present our work next Wednesday which is not long considering we have to do the demo of the app too. We’ve written the script for the presentation but we’ve not run through it yet and I have a feeling it’s too long. However, I’d rather it be too long at this point and us have to cut things out and make it more concise. We have a few days now to practice and refine the presentation so we should have plenty of time to perfect it. I’m hoping we can do our first run through this afternoon. 

Last night I went to an excellent meetup hosted by the UXPA at the Aviva Design Garage. It was all about smart technology and future trends in UX. The speakers told us that we generally see big changes in technology every 6 - 8 years (the last one was when the iPhone came out) so we’re due another major change now. 

AI seemed to be a hot topic and the speakers discussed how we might be able to use AI to help us in our everyday lives. Another big area for debate is data. You need to have a large input of data to create smart algorithms and give users unique and personalised experiences, however, people are cautious about sharing data - they are concerned about how it will be used, their privacy and their security. We should design with empathy and use data to make a positive impact. So we, as UXer’s need to empower users to make informed, responsible decisions - how can we display or present T&C’s etc in a way that they will actually read them. 

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After working hard on the low-fidelity wireframes and getting them into an interactive prototype, we tested our app on several users. We were feeling pretty good about our designs, however, the testing uncovered many areas for improvement. 

For example, a lot of the icons were too small and the text wasn’t clear enough so people couldn’t really see what they were. This was especially true for the icons which had been rated - they just looked like black circles. Other feedback concerned how to actually use the app - most people we spoke to asked for a short set of instructions when using the app for the first time. Another common pain point for users was around the carousel system - it was not clear that there were two separate carousels on one page (when viewing the key business areas) so we needed to think about how we would solve this problem.  

We thought about doing another iteration of low-fidelity wireframes and go through a third round of testing, but time is against us so we’ve decided to go straight into the high-fidelity mock-up and make the changes as we go along. 

I’ve summarised it all the feedback into two pages to ensure we don’t miss anything. Vincent and I have tasked ourselves with a number of screens to work on this evening so we should be in a good position tomorrow morning, ready to get them into Marvel for testing in the afternoon. 

Nik is working on the presentation. I’ve written a draft version of the script so he’s now working on the slide deck. We’ll need to get the presentation content and slides complete by Friday so we can start practising on Saturday. 

Next week the focus will be on ensuring we’re fully prepared for our presentations and writing the specification document for our client. Still lots to do but the end is in sight! 

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Wireframes...! So. Many. Wireframes! 

Today I have been... you guessed it... creating wireframes for our prototype app. I’ve actually quite enjoyed and got to the point where I was able to put them into InVision and make the screens interactive! It’s taken a while (and an awful lot of concentration) but I’m pretty pleased with how they’ve turned out. However, my eyes are now completely square from staring at the screen all day :)

Whilst I was busy creating the low-fidelity wireframes, Vincent completed our persona and the style-tile for the high-fidelity prototype, and started designing some of the icons for our app. He is an absolute whizz with the Adobe Creative Suite - his graphic design skills are truly amazing. I think just about everyone who walked past his laptop stopped, stared for a moment and said “wow!!”. I envy his eye for design so much!

For the afternoon, Nik was out testing the paper prototype to gain more feedback from users on which areas of the app still required improvement. Once he got back to GA, he debriefed Vincent and I, and wrote up his findings. The double-carousel feature got mixed feedback (although it might just have been because the paper prototype doesn’t demonstrate it too well) and he also found out that some of the icons are not very clear. This was similar to the feedback we got last night from Angelica. It was a really worth-while exercise and I’m glad we managed to test on quite a few users as it really validates the results we’re getting and identified common pain-points. 

We had a long discussion and decided to keep the double-carousel feature for now and see how it tests in the low-fidelity interactive prototype (we should be able to demonstrate it much better now it’s digital), and talked about changing the flow through the app to make the rating system clearer (this was another area for improvement from our feedback) and rearrange some of the icons in the splash menu.

I’ve had enough of wireframes for the day so I’ve handed this over to Nik and Vincent to continue with tonight, whilst I make a start on the script for the presentation! 

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Today has been all about the paper prototype! We got out the pens, pencils, paper and scissors and turned “Blue Peter”. We created a sort of production line, making all the screens, pop-out windows, pop-out menus, carousels etc. I really enjoyed it and was pleased with what we managed to produce!

We finished our first iteration just in time for my appointment with my tester. I dashed off with Vincent and met the lovely Angelica in Cafe Nero to get her feedback. The testing went really well. She liked the new design (she had also tested the original interactive prototype produced by our client) and said it was a huge improvement - she now felt like she was learning about investing by using the app and said it was efficient and allowed her to dig deeper into the detailed information if she wanted to. 

However, she did also raise a few points for improvement. She was unsure what a couple of menu options meant and when she clicked on them, they took her to an unexpected page (we’ll need to relabel these options so they provide the user better understanding), the rating system was not at all clear (again, we need t think about the labelling on this feature) and she would also like to change the portfolio view - Angelica said she would like to have it broken down by sector or by risk exposure so she can see how it is split, rather than just having a plain list of companies.

The feedback Angelica provided us with will be used in our next iteration. Nik also has a few testers lined up for tomorrow so I’m looking forward to getting their reactions to the paper prototype too. We’ll be going digital for our next prototype, creating low-fidelity wireframes, before we prepare the high-fidelity prototype for our client.

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On Friday morning I facilitated a fun and productive design studio with the guys from Qrowded. It was awesome and everyone really enjoyed it. Working collaboratively to design a screen for the app was a challenging experience but design the guys produced was excellent and incorporated lots of great ideas from them all.

The afternoon flew by as we reflected on the morning’s workshop and made a plan for the next steps. We also had a lecture in the afternoon on Axure - a software tool to help build interactive prototypes of apps and websites. It’s a pretty complex tool and took us all some time to get our heads around it. There is an awful lot you can do with Axure and we barely scratched the surface so there’s still loads more to learn. However, I think it’ll be a case of practice, practice, practice. 

The output from the design studio gave us a really good starting point for the screen designs for the rest of the app, so over the weekend, I met with my team and the Barbican library where we designed the rest of the screens and started to build our paper prototype. I’m looking forward to testing it on Monday to see what feedback we get from the users!

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Today has been another busy day... is there any other kind at GA? ;) We met with our client first thing this morning and had a really good chat about the direction they want to take their app in. We had three persona’s, each with quite different needs but by the end of the meeting Nik, Vincent and I came away feeling much clearer on which persona we need to focus on and design for. 

From that we were able to draft out our site map and list all the features to be included in the app. To give ourselves further direction in our designs, we felt it was important to prioritise the features so we did this using the MoSCoW system (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have). This was a fundamental exercise as it meant we could identify the features that would make up the MVP (minimum viable product) and de-scope some the nice-to-have’s. 

Tomorrow we have our design studio planned so we spent the rest of the afternoon planning that. Together we devised the agenda, sorted out the timings and agreed on the problem we want to solve in the design studio. I have agreed to be facilitator for the group - time-boxing in the design studio will be crucial to it’s success so I’m quite looking forward to bossing the 5 guys around :P 

Late in the afternoon we had some ex-GA students come in and talk to us about life after the course. It was really interesting to hear their stories and find out what kinds of jobs they’re in. They all had really positive stories and seemed to be really happy with where they’ve ended up which is fantastic! I hope the rest of us are as lucky! 

This evening Nik, Elvis and I attended a meet-up about Portfolio’s. We got some really important insights from two recruiters, and two senior UX people. I wrote lots of notes so I plan to use their advice and apply it to my own portfolio.

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This morning kicked off with some light stretches and dancing courtesy of Luis. Freestyling to dance music at 9:30am felt a bit surreal but it certainly woke us all up and got us feeling energised for the day ahead.

After a lecture on content strategy, we consolidated all our interview data and looked for comparisons. It was really interesting to go through it all, as although the three of us had gone to our interviews the same objectives, we had all focused on different angles and gained very different insights. We gained some really useful information that will feed into the various areas of the app.

The afternoon was soon upon us, as was the class crawl. Nik stayed at our station whilst Vincent and I visited the other teams to see how they are getting on. It was comforting to hear that a lot of the teams were at a similar point in their projects and are experiencing that same kind of issues as us. We compared strategies for moving forward and it sounds like everyone has a good plan in place. 

After the class crawl, our team decided to do a couple more interviews. Up to that point, our interviews had been with people who have a fairly good knowledge of investments, so we needed to speak to people who had no very little knowledge but wanted to understand more. We completed a task analysis looking at how they would go about educating themselves, and I tested our client’s prototype with another user. Again, it was useful to gain feedback on the prototype and see how people navigated the app and what they thought it did.

We ended the day by planning our agenda for the meeting with our client tomorrow. We need some clarity on who they see as their main target user (someone with no knowledge but would like to educate themselves, someone who has a lot of knowledge but has never invested before, or someone who has invested before but failed and would like to increase their investment knowledge) as this will dictate the screens we end up designing. Although we’d like to cater for all three personas, we are only doing a 2 week sprint so we will have to focus in on one persona and present their journey through the app. 

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There were no lectures today we were able to crack on with our projects. The first thing we did was get our surveys sent out so we can start collecting some real user data. We posted our survey in reddit, on some investment forums, facebook, the GA alumni network and all over twitter. We haven’t had a huge response yet but I’m hoping we’ll get some more responses this evening. If you fancy giving it a go, you can find it here. 

We arranged 4 user interviews for the afternoon and evening with the aim of getting more qualitative data and acecdotal evidence from people who either have no investment knowledge, or people who have some but would like to increase it.

Nik interviewed two old work colleagues in the financial services industry and Vincent interviewed his sisters boyfriend. They provided us with some great insights and confirmed some of our initial assumptions.

I interviewed Angelica who took UXDI9 late last year. I ended up spending two hours with her and gained SO much valuable information. She knows a bit about investments so I asked her how she’d gained that knowledge - she was able to provide me with a whole load of websites that she’s used so I’ll be doing come more competitor analysis on those tonight / tomorrow. I also tested the high-fidelity prototype that Qrowded have created on her. I recorded the whole thing so we can re-watch it and analyse it in more detail tomorrow. However, it was really interesting to get her views on the prototype app as it was the first time she’d seen it - she was unsure what certain icons meant, she thought some icons were buttons (although they weren’t) and she was confused by the flow through the app and the purpose of rating firms. She felt it was less of an educational tool and more of a marketing platform for the crowdfunding sites. All very useful feedback that we will need to take into account. 

It turns out Angelica lives just around the corner from me so we got the tube home together. She was able to tell me about her experiences in finding a job after the course, which again, was incredibly useful. Everyone’s experience sounds different so it’s really interesting to hear people’s stories and the advice I can pick up from them.

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Our team (Nik, Vincent and I) met up at the weekend at a cool little cafe with a great working space in the basement. It was perfect! We got our laptops out, post-it notes and sharpies at the ready and got going!

We worked really hard and managed to get loads done. We researched our client, Qrowded, viewed their existing prototype many times, got to grips with the brief, researched their competitors and looked into gamification (as the guys are looking to bring an element of gamification to the educational aspect of the app). We also managed to agree our project plan, write the project summary and draft some survey questions.

Today we had a lecture first thing and then the rest of the day was spent working on our project. The guys from Qrowded were scheduled to come in to see us at 2pm for our first meeting so we made sure we were fully prepared for and had all our questions ready.

The meeting with our client went really well. They’re lovely guys and seem excited to get started on the project. They’re keen to get really involved with what we’re doing so that’s great. The guys have done a great job designing a prototype already but are looking for a bit of assistance with the user flows, site map and visual design. They haven’t been able to do much in the way of user research or usability testing so we’ll be focussing mainly on this.

After the meeting, our team had a debrief and went over the topics we discussed in more detail. However, this surfaced further questions. Luckily the guys were camped out at a pub round the corner so we asked them to pop back in to see us at GA to clarify a couple of points. The second meeting with them really helped us to define their concept and vision of the app so it was definitely a worthwhile meeting.

After that, Nik, Vincent and I had a chat with Luis, our instructor, to discuss how best to tackle the next steps and direction of the project. As our client already have a prototype, we were unsure how best to move forward. However, the design still needs researching and testing so we’re going to park their prototype for now, carry out our user research from scratch and come up with some designs with an aim to producing a basic paper prototype. We’ll then test our paper prototype along side testing their prototype and take the best elements from both. We’ll then be able to combine the designs and come up with a proposal for our client. That’s the plan anyway.. :)

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Friday saw the introduction to our client projects! But first we had an awesome lecture on teams followed by an exercise on team communication which involved us playing with lego!

I really enjoyed the lecture on teams - it taught us about how important team ethos is to the success of a team and which firms demonstrate good examples for how their teams operate. We also looked at self-selecting teams which is a completely new concept to me - it certainly opened my mind up to new ways of working! The lecture made me think about the type of firm I would like to work for and that maybe my original aspirations to work for certain firms is slightly misjudged and that I should be looking for different qualities. 

The lego exercise which followed was so much fun. The tutors had build a lego structure in classroom 3 and hid it behind a cardboard wall, out of sight. We got into teams and had one builder in a separate room (who couldn’t speak), 1 looker (the only person who could see the structure) and 2 runners. The looker would describe the structure to the runners who would then describe it to the builder to build. It was so funny to see how the teams interpreted the instructions from the looker when compared to how the original structure looked. 

Finally, we were given our project brief. We are working for an awesome start-up called Qrowded. Their concept is to build an educational app for people wishing to learn more about investing in equities in crowdfunding firms. We were super excited to get started, but first up, Thirst Friday with the whole GA alumni!

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I think I reached a milestone in my coding today! It’s taken me most of the day just to align three images but I feel like it’s beginning to click. Java Script is still a complete unknown to me but I’m definitely progressing with HTML and CSS :D

I’m not sure I’m cut-out to code my own website for my portfolio from scratch (I’ll probably use a template and customise it) and I still don’t love my design but, considering I knew nothing on Monday morning, I’m really happy with how far I’ve come in the last couple of days. 

Tomorrow morning we’ll be finished off our designs ready to present them later in the day. We’ll be told our teams and be given our client briefs for our final project tomorrow so it’s a real mix of nerves and excitement! It’s going to be our toughest challenge yet but I’m really looking forward to getting started on our client projects. Bring on tomorrow!

First though, I’m off to the next meetup. This one is being hosted by Glug and we’ll have talks from the renowned digital design agency, ustwo. Can’t wait!

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Day 3 of coding - it’s hard!

Today we were learning more “advanced” CSS (or at least that’s what Gerry tells to make us feel a bit better!). I’m pretty sure we’re still at the very basic end of the scale but the complexity has certainly increased (for me at least!). 

I’ve found coding to be very frustrating, especially when it comes to aligning and positioning things the way you want them. Just when you think you’re getting there, something else falls out of line and it all goes wrong. Luckily our tutor, Gerry, was able to help me out when google failed to provide the answers I was searching for. He makes it look so easy! I spent about an hour and a half trying to figure something out and he was able to resolve it in about 1 minute! I guess it just takes time... something that we don’t have a lot of on this course! :P

Hopefully I’ll get the rest of my site looking half-decent by tomorrow so that I’m in a position to present it by Friday.

This evening, I went to an awesome meetup - possibly the best one I’ve been to yet. There was a great turn-out from GA (including people from UXDI9, UXDI10 and UXDI11)! Go team! The talk was hosted by Cyber Duck and Digital Pond in preparation for the SXSW events being held in Texas soon. They had some excellent speakers from covering fascinating topics such as the ethics of dark patterns and going beyond responsive design. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it’s given me lots to think when I’m designing :D

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So this morning we were all coding along with Gerry again before we were left to our own devices to code our own site. After a shakey start and some practice this evening, I feel like I’m actually getting the hang of it! (Well, HTML anyway)

I’ve created 3 pages for my portfolio website and entered the content (text, links and images) using HTML. Now I just need to style it in CSS. It looks terrible right now because the styling is all wrong but I’m pretty pleased with my progress nonetheless. I’ve made a start on the CSS and I’ve managed to code all the fonts, font-sizes, colours, etc, but the formatting definitely requires a lot more work. For example, the alignment of a lot of the text is completely out, the size of the pictures are wrong, I need to sort my margins out etc. 

I’ve googled a couple of my problems and checked the trusted Stack Overflow website for solutions but I haven’t been able to figure it out so far. However, I think we’re going to be covering more advanced CSS in tomorrow’s lectures so hopefully I’ll be able to get a lot of things sorted out then. 

In the meantime, check out my progress. I’d added pictures of my wireframes to give you an idea of how I want it to look by the end of the week.

This afternoon we also had an Outcomes session with Casey which was really useful as we covered the topic of CV’s. We had a look at some examples of good and bad ones, and discussed what was appropriate to include and what to information omit. I did a bit of work on my CV over the weekend but the session today has given me lots more guidance and areas for improvement so I plan to give it another go this weekend. Casey will be reviewing our updated CV’s in two weeks time so I’ll look forward to receiving her feedback!

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It’s week 7 (already!) which means it’s front end web development week! 

We had a couple of lectures this morning with Gerry at the helm, where we learnt how the web works. It took me a while to get my head around it but I think I’m just about there. Next, we coded in HTML along with Gerry to make two very simple web pages - I’ve done a couple of online classes in web development so this part was fairly easy. However, it’s going to get a lot tougher as the week goes on and we start to build our own portfolio’s using HTML, CSS and Javascript. I’m looking forward to the challenge!

This afternoon we continued designing wireframes for the portfolio’s we’re going to create. I had a look at the portfolio’s of a few GA alumni for inspiration - they look great! I don’t think we’ll be reaching that level by the end of the week but it’s amazing to see how they could potentially look in the future!

I’m still not sure about the overall design of my portfolio or what colours and typeface I want to use, but the purpose this week is to learn the process so I’m going to make some quick executive decisions about colour schemes etc. just so I can move on and learn about the coding side. I can always go back and properly design my site later on once I’ve finished the course. 

We’ve been told that this is a bit of a quieter week so I’m going to try and get to some meet-ups on Wednesday and Thursday. I’m really looking forward to them! 

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It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere.

There's a door on the 10th floor of the Vox Media office I hate so much. I can never remember which way it opens, and I get it wrong every single time. You probably know one of these terror doors...

Great little video! Thanks for the recommendation @luis_klefsjo

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Today we have been continuing to work on our mockups. 

I got some feedback on my very first design and the main points were that my background was too pale and bland - the app is supposed to be striking and bold but it wasn’t conveying that message to the users.

I took the comments on board and started designing the second version of my mockup (photo one above). I tried to make the colours darker to make the elements of my design standout. However, when I tested it on some users, the feedback was that it felt clinical, unfriendly and serious, a bit like a management tool. The testers were completely right!! This was so far from my design objective of being fun, spirited, rugged etc. I needed to make some serious changes in order to bring it back in line with the brand personality I had set out to achieve. 

So this evening I worked on the third iteration of my mockup (see photo 2). Although it’s still not perfect (there’s ALWAYS room for improvement) I’m much happier with the results. I’ve tested it on my flatmate this evening and (without giving her any hints) she said all the right words when describing my app. In fact, she thought it was friendly, exciting, young and fun. Great result! 

Tomorrow we’ll be presenting our designs in a group crit so I’m looking forward to getting more feedback from my colleagues to see how I could further improve upon my designs.